Quick Fixes, Workarounds, and Other Neat Tricks

Thank You SPS Charlotte!

This weekend I had the honor of speaking at SharePoint Saturday Charlotte. Great attendance, great speakers, great sponsors, and great organizers! I had a fantastic time and I heard a lot of very positive feedback from attendees. SPSCLT 2017 was a huge success and I’m grateful I got to be a part of it.

SPS CLT 2017 Speakers at TopGolf

Here’s a video of me hitting a golf ball for maybe the third time in my life. Behold my glory:

My Session

I presented Understanding SharePoint Framework Extensions. You can find the slides and a link to the samples demonstrated below. Here’s the outline:

SharePoint Development: A Brief History

Modern Pages

An Introduction to the SharePoint Framework

Client-side Web Parts

Tool Comparison

The SharePoint Workbench

Key npm and Gulp Tasks

Hello World Demo

SPFx Extensions: Extending Modern Pages

Types of SPFx Extensions

Current Extension Limitations

SPFx Extension Demos

SharePoint Patterns & Practices

What’s in PnP (Selective Highlights)

Staying Up to Date with PnP

Demo Troubles

Prior to SPS I noticed that there were some changes in my developer tenant that required some adjustments of the List Driven Placeholders sample. Specifically, the placeholders seemed to be switching from PageHeader to Top and from PageFooter to Bottom. This was pretty easy to work around, but I reached out via the issues list since I was nervous other changes were on their way.

Vesa reached out immediately and let me know I was “in slightly dangerous waters” and suggested I take screenshots just in case. I followed his advice (glad I did!) and even included his response in the slides as my official disclaimer, haha.

Needless to say, I was a little nervous and checked the demos constantly including 30 minutes before my session. Everything was working! However, during the actual session I received a lot of errors. I remember saying that I thought there might be some errors but that I had expected them on the site not during my gulp serve command. Perhaps I should’ve listened to myself.

Unfortunately, I let confirmation bias and the nerves of speaking overrule my troubleshooting skills. I assumed the dreaded breaking changes had gotten me! In reality, I hadn’t stopped my last gulp serve command from showing the hello world web part. A really simple and (normally) obvious mistake.

Fortunately, I was able to show the screenshots as Vesa had suggested and things worked out fine. I regret that I gave the impression that SPFx Extensions were temporarily broken. I’m also sorry my audience didn’t get to see the samples in their full glory (screenshots work, but aren’t as cool as seeing it actually do the magic).